Effective Time Management – Get 10X More Done in Less Time

This is a review of Effective Time Management – Get 10X More Done in Less Time Udemy online course. Overall it did not resonate with me. The examples and advise given seemed to be geared towards corporation CEOs or people running very successful online businesses (“You can generate ideas yourself – OR you can put together a team to generate ideas for you” type of advice). Somehow I feel those types of people would not be doing Udemy courses but I might be wrong. The type of person more likely to do this course who is somewhat lower down the career ladder or self-employed like myself I feel won’t find much useful advice.

On the other hand, the way I look at personal development is if you get just one idea that helps you do things that little bit better, its worth the investment of time and money. I did get not 1 but 2 such new ideas.

Firstly, I have been practising Pomodoro 25 minute interval working for a little while now. But for me main drive behind it was to enforce breaks and keep my mind fresh since I can work for many hours non stop and neglect my needs if left unchecked. The idea that this course is suggesting is not just to work in 25-minute intervals but also to try to give the task at hand a LIMIT of 25 minutes. The theory behind this I have heard before and apply it in my life in other ways – the work will always take up all the time allotted to it. So the reasoning goes, if you try to allot very little time to a task, you are likely to complete it much faster than if you worked without a limit. I am now trying to practice this idea of limiting but can not report success yet. The way I already apply this principle of work taking up all the allowed time is by starting work to later in the day when I have the pressure of the sun going down hurrying me to complete the day’s tasks. For that reason working first thing in the morning to then try to enjoy the afternoon as my time off fails for me as I end up working from early in the morning until late in the evening instead.

The second important idea I got from the course is that to improve one’s productivity there is no magic way to control the time – everyone has the same amount of time in the day. What we can do, however, is control our tasks – we need to focus on the highest leverage, highest profitability tasks and outsource and eliminate the rest. The examples given were Oprah Winfrey and Bill Gates and the other high world achievers. They spend their days working on the top 1% tasks producing millions of dollars of revenue while many other people in their organisations do lower leverage tasks for them. This is certainly a great ideal to strive towards and in my 10+ year quest to outsource my business I am sure this idea will help me better estimate the tasks I should be doing myself vs those I should hire someone else to do.